Metadiscourse in Academic Writing: An Investigation of Graduate Students' MA Theses in Taiwan

Chi-yee Lin

National Chengchi University, Taiwan

Abstract

This research is intended to examine the metadiscourse features of eight MA theses published by the graduate students of National Taiwan University (TU), National Taiwan Normal University (NU), National Chengchi University (CCU), and National Tsing-Hua University (TSU), each providing two theses on literature and linguistics respectively. It reports that Taiwanese graduate student writers (TGSW) use much more textual features (68.63%) than interpersonal features (31.37%) and English academic writers (EAW) in Hyland’s research also use more textual features (55.10) than interpersonal features (44.90). However, the discrepancy between TGSW and EAW in the use of textual features and interpersonal features seems to boil down to a conclusion that TGSW use more textual features than EAW by 13.53% and less interpersonal features by 23.73%. It further indicates that the first three ranked subcategories are logical connectives, hedges, and code glosses for TGSW and hedges, logical connectives, and code glosses for EAW. All of these have actually provided some pedagogical implications for the instruction of academic writing..